Mysticism in English Literature | Page 6

fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This ... is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.[4]
That is a passage whose music re-echoes through many pages of English literature, especially in the poems of Spenser, Shelley, and Keats.
Plato may therefore be regarded as the source of speculative mysticism in Europe, but it is Plotinus, his disciple, the Neo-platonist, who is the father of European mysticism in its full sense, practical as well as speculative, and who is also its most profound exponent. Plotinus (A.D. 204-270), who was an Egyptian by birth, lived and studied under Ammonius Sakkas in Alexandria at a time when it was the centre of the intellectual world, seething with speculation and schools, teachers and philosophies of all kinds, Platonic and Oriental, Egyptian and Christian. Later, from the age of forty, he taught in Rome, where he was surrounded by many eager adherents. He drew the form of his thought both from Plato and from Hermetic philosophy (his conception of Emanation), but its real inspiration was his own experience, for his biographer Porphyry has recorded that during the six years he lived with Plotinus the latter attained four times to ecstatic union with "the One." Plotinus combined, in unusual measure, the intellect of the metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason. His sixth Ennead, "On the Good or the One," is one of the great philosophic treatises of the world, and it sums up in matchless words the whole mystic position and experience. There are two statements in it which contain the centre of the writer's thought. "God is not external to any one, but is present in all things, though they are ignorant that he is so." "God is not in a certain place, but wherever anything is able to come into contact with him there he is present" (Enn. vi. 9, §§ 4, 7). It is because of our ignorance of the indwelling of God that our life is discordant, for it is clashing with its own inmost principle. We do not know ourselves. If we did, we would know that the way home to God lies within ourselves. "A soul that knows itself must know that the proper direction of its energy is not outwards in a straight line, but round a centre which is within it" (Enn. vi. 9, § 8).
The whole Universe is one vast Organism (Enn. ix. 4, §§ 32, 45), and the Heart of God, the source of all life, is at the centre, in which all finite things have their being, and to which they must flow back; for there is in this Organism, so Plotinus conceives, a double circulatory movement, an eternal out-breathing and in-breathing, the way down and the way up. The way down is the out-going of the undivided "One" towards manifestation. From Him there flows out a succession of emanations. The first of these is the "Nous" or Over-Mind of the Universe, God as thought. The "Mind" in turn throws out an image, the third Principle in this Trinity, the Soul of all things. This, like the "Nous," is immaterial, but it can act on matter. It is the link between man and God, for it has a lower and a higher side. The lower side desires a body and so creates it, but it is not wholly incarnate in it, for, as Plotinus says, "the soul always leaves something of itself above."
From this World Soul proceed the individual souls of men, and they partake of its nature. Its nature is triple, the animal or sensual soul, closely bound to the body, the logical reasoning human soul, and the intellectual soul, which is one with the Divine Mind, from whence it comes and of which it is an image.
Souls have forgotten then: divine origin because at first they were so delighted with their liberty and surroundings (like children let loose from their parents, says Plotinus), that they ran away in a direction as far as possible from their source. They thus became clogged with the joys and distractions of this lower life, which can never satisfy them, and they are ignorant of their own true nature and essence. In order to return home, the soul has to retrace the path along which she came, and the first step is to get to know herself, and so to know God. (See Enn. vi. 9, § 7.) Thus only can she be restored to the central unity of the